Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Babadook
2014 · Jennifer Kent · The Babadook on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch how blue and gray the inside of the house stays. (light)
Radek Ladczuk drains the warmth out of every interior. Walls, daylight through the windows and Amelia's clothes are all the same cold blue-gray. Nothing in the house has any color to give.
Payoff: The palette makes the home feel already dead, so exhaustion registers as a place you are in rather than a mood.
Count how often Amelia is framed inside a doorway or window. (staging)
Kent stages her against thresholds: the bedroom door, the staircase, the basement door, window frames. The architecture holds her in position, and as she frays the geometry presses in closer.
Payoff: The house does the work a monster usually does, so the threat has an address before it ever has a body.
Listen for scratching and clicking coming from somewhere off screen. (sound)
Jed Kurzel's score drops to a low drone and leaves room for the house: knocks, scratching, a ringing phone, that rasped ba-ba-DOOK. The creature is a noise long before it is a shape.
Payoff: Fear here is built out of what the frame excludes, so your own hearing does most of the work.
Look at the book itself: black-and-white pop-ups, top hat, long fingers. (setting)
Alexander Juhasz drew Mister Babadook in a stiff, archaic Victorian style. Kent keeps putting the object back in the frame and back in Amelia's hands, asking you to read it rather than watch it act.
Payoff: The book is a surface the film hands you to interpret, and every interpretation you reach points back at Amelia. In the reading: the readable image (lectosign). An image that stops explaining itself and asks instead to be read is what the reading calls a lectosign.
Watch Essie Davis in the scenes where she cannot sleep. (performance)
Davis plays exhaustion as a physical condition first: slack mouth, unfocused stare, a body doing chores on nothing. The menace grows out of that same tiredness rather than arriving from outside her.
Payoff: Her unraveling is visible from the first reel, which is why both accounts of what is happening stay level with each other.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Keep your eye on the doorways. Kent frames Amelia inside them until the house does the threatening.